Sophie and the Rising Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

for him to go to the white church. I guess Ruth was just assuming that, eventually, he would want to go to church somewhere, just like everybody else in this town. Except me. And Eulalie, too, come to think of it.
    “And what’s wrong with him going to your church?” I asked her that day. Of course, I knew what she thought was wrong with that, and truthfully, I came right out and asked her because I wanted to see her squirm. And sure enough, she started squirming right away, and I’m sorry to say that I enjoyed every minute of it.
    “Why, Anne!” she fairly sputtered. “He certainly can’t come to our church!”
    “But why not?” I asked in an innocent voice, and I particularly enjoyed driving that nail home.
    “You know perfectly well why not!” She lowered her voice, as if she were revealing a deep, dark secret. “He’s not white !”
    “And he’s not black , either,” I whispered back, as if that, too, were a secret. Then I paused for a moment before I added, “And I strongly suspect he’s not even a Christian, at all, so you can stop worrying about him wanting to come to your church.”
    Well, that certainly set her back, I should say, and I could see a terrible struggle going on inside her—between her “Christian duty” to bring this errant lamb to the fold of Christ’s flock and her blatant determination that he not enter that fold on a path that led through the white church.
    But I couldn’t bear watching her dilemma any longer, because somehow, all the pleasure had gone out of it. “Just leave him alone, Ruth. I don’t think he wants to go to any church at all.”
    About that time, Mr. Oto knocked on the back door, and Ruth followed me as far as the kitchen and waited there while I went to the door. And the whole time Mr. Oto and I were discussing what to do about a diseased oleander, she watched him as if—given the right opportunity—he would drink blood and howl at the full moon.
    Why, if he had said Boo! she would have run right into the doorjamb! I guess by that time, though, she’d made up her mind to forget about trying to save his soul, because she never brought up the subject of Mr. Oto’s going to any church again. In fact, I don’t think she ever looked at him after that day. Maybe she decided to pretend that he didn’t exist. That certainly relieved her of her “Christian duty!”
    But anyway, that’s why I had to make sure that if I gave him my permission to build this hut of his, he wouldn’t be worshiping an idol in it or anything like that. For it might have attracted Ruth’s attention and maybe even brought her descending upon me once again. I certainly didn’t want that to happen.
    “Not worship an idol,” he assured me, and he only thought he was hiding that smile of his from me.
    Well, I was thinking, if he isn’t going to worship an idol and the hut can’t be seen from the street anyway, what harm can it do?
    “All right,” I said at last, and I sighed loudly enough to discourage him from asking me for anything else and went back into the house, leaving him bent in a deep bow and still smiling at the ground. Always did drive me crazy, that did. All that smiling he did all the time. And the bowing.
    And like I said, people around here never did get used to him—or even try to get to know him at all. I guess either they thought he was a heathen, like Ruth did, or else they couldn’t get past the color of his skin—a very deep honey-brown. Not quite dark enough to be thought of as black. But certainly not light enough to be called white, either. And the dark, slanted eyes that—really—were quite kind, if you took the time to look at them and to get close enough to him to do that.
    I took quite a bit of criticism, sure enough, letting him stay in the gardener’s cottage behind my back wall. But for the most part, folks around here were used to my doing things they thought were controversial. Because I never thought anyone—especially me—should live